RMB

Wow. I take my hat off to the combined drafting skills of the US Treasury and the Chinese for this inspired bit of calculated dullness, of almost North Korean calibre. That’s an object lesson in damping down speculation about deals over an end to the renminbi peg, for one news cycle at least. In a cricketing culture, that would be called playing with a dead bat. For the US and China, it’s smothering the ember of news with the wettest of wet blankets.

So now it looks like the April 15 deadline for the US Treasury’s currency report is conveniently going to slip, largely because it would look a bit churlish to welcome Hu Jintao to Washington for the April 12-13 nuclear talks and then hang a big scarlet sign saying “MANIPULATOR” round his neck as soon as he steps off the plane. Most likely it will also slip beyond the “strategic and economic dialogue” meeting that the US is having with China in May. And then maybe beyond the G20 at the end of June? Or perhaps, if the US has piped down about the currency for a couple of months, China might announce a float, or a crawling revaluation, some time in June.

But one question is whether Congress is prepared to wait that long. Charles Schumer (Dem, NY, not a fan of China) wants to introduce his bill allowing a limited form of currency retaliation against China by the end of May. The key question for the coming weeks is how much patience Capitol Hill has with waiting both for the currency report and for Beijing to move. Congress might secretly be paragons of patience. But they sure don’t look like it.

This letter the other day from Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Lee Myung-Bak and Stephen Harper looks at first sight like the usual bland exhortations for everyone to do better. (Why didn’t Angela Merkel sign, btw? Too busy with Greece?) But the semiotics are a bit more complex. The bit about “We all understand that ongoing trade, fiscal and structural imbalances cannot lead to strong and sustainable growth” looks pretty much like a pointed jab at China.

So does this mean the currency wars are going to break out in the G20? Since the grouping is supposed to work on consensus, it has generally shied away from arguments about exchange rates, which have the potential to blow up any meeting or institution in which they take place. Throwing them into the mix will make G20 meetings a lot livelier, at least. I’m not convinced it’s wise, though, for a joint letter apparently aimed at China to be signed exclusively by a gang of rich countries. If the US wants to use the G20 to put pressure on the Chinese, it will have to get on board emerging market countries also suffering from renminbi undervaluation, Brazil being the obvious example. The last thing the US wants is to replicate the unhelpfully rigid rich-country-vs.-poor-country divisions that have blocked progress in the WTO.

The battle over exchange rates between Beijing and Washington is warming up nicely after a few years’ hiatus, only with a bit more urgency this time. Today’s hearing at the House Ways and Means committee canvassed proposals for what to do about it. Interestingly, there was more consensus among the experts testifying than previously that China holding down the renminbi was a serious problem. But the solutions all seemed less than forceful: call China a currency manipulator, go to the IMF, go to the WTO.

The more confrontational solutions, like imposing anti-subsidy duties to combat currency undervaluation, didn’t get much support. Sandy Levin, the Michigan Democrat who currently chairs the committee, has a reputation as a sceptic of free-trade purists, but he sounded pretty cautious about anything that might touch off a direct confrontation. Read more

China is carrying out stress tests on labor-intensive industries to gauge the effect a stronger yuan would have on earnings, reports Bloomberg (itself reporting local paper the 21st Century Business Herald). Consequent speculation on the yuan has pushed forward prices up.

The yuan’s value has been kept at about 6.83 per dollar since July 2008, following a 21 per cent advance over three years, as policymakers intervened to help exporters weather a global recession. Read more

The Money Supply team

Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS

Claire Jones is the FT's Eurozone economy correspondent, based in Frankfurt. Prior to this, she was an economics reporter in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS

Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS

Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent in London. Before that, she was a Lex writer, covered the US economy from Washington and the Icelandic banking collapse from Reykjavik. Sarah studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007. RSS

Ferdinando Giugliano is the FT's global economy news editor, based in London. Ferdinando holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he was also a lecturer, and has worked as a consultant for the Bank of Italy, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxera. He joined the FT in 2011 as a leader writer. RSS

Emily Cadman is an economics reporter at the FT, based in London. Prior to this, she worked as a data journalist and was head of interactive news at the Financial Times. She joined the FT in 2010, after working as a web editor at a variety of news organisations.
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Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS

Ben McLannahan covers markets and economics for the FT from Tokyo, and before that he wrote Lex notes from London and Hong Kong. He studied English at Cambridge University and joined the FT in 2007, after stints at the Economist Group and Institutional Investor. RSS